A Man of Southern Distinction

ONE OF THE things you're supposed to do, if you're a big-time freelance journalist, is publish a collection of magazine articles every now and then on the theory that your writing has enough literary value to merit being sandwiched between hard covers for posterity. There are, of course, some pitfalls: Despite prefaces that try to tie it all together, journalistic collections often fail even to approach working as a unified whole.

People who write a wide variety of articles for a wide variety of magazines can take a lot of liberties that people who write books can't. They don't have to worry too much about consistency, and they can get lazy in their writing without attracting too much notice. If a magazine writer falls upon a particular turn of phrase that pleases his ear or an observation that he considers particularly telling, he can use it over and over in different pieces for different magazines without anyone really noticing. When the pieces are collected in book form, however, all of the writer's laziness and over-facile devices come out in the wash, and he can end up seeming much less thoughtful than a reader of his articles as they appeared would have remembered.

Paul Hemphill, the latest journalist to try his hand at the anthology genre, does not entirely succeed in overcoming these obstacles in his new collection of pieces about the South, The Good Old Boys. For example: in an essay on his father, Hemphill writes, "now my old man...was, as we say, tacky." In a piece on the roller derby, he begins a section by saying, "If it's Sunday, this must be Louisville," and a few pages later, on Merle Haggard, he begins, "If it's Friday, this must be Dayton." He also goes to embarrassing lengths when given half a chance to describe the relationship between moonshining and stock-car racing, and he explains several laborious times exactly what a "good old boy" is.

None of this is particularly grave, but it is emblematic of a more dangerous problem. Repeated catch phrases and stock observations are dissonant, but repeated preconceived notions about subject matter can destroy the value of the kind of writing Hemphill does, and a collection of magazine pieces can make such notions painfully obvious. Hemphill runs the risk of dealing in preconceptions more than most writers, because his turf, the South, is defined in the national eye almost exclusively in preconceptions.

Hemphill is a former columnist for The Atlanta Journal who, since going freelance a few years ago, has become one of the people who interprets the South for the magazine-reading public. It's a position similar to that of travel/adventure writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the people who would go off to Africa and the East and return with reports of dark and exotic lands. People who write about the South for a national audience seem bound to weigh in with a series of set-pieces. There's the New South, the Changing South, the Hillbilly South, the Old South, the Racist South, the Devout South--the point is, a writer who fails to make the South seem strange and different has not accomplished what he was supposed to do, just like a writer who has not presented the midwest as normal and placid.

HEMPHILL announces his biases at the outset of The Good Old Boys: He believes, probably correctly, that the South as a distinct and different part of America is dying, and that his job is to chronicle what's left of it. He writes about sports, failure, country music, religion and small-town life but for the most part avoids sounding like he's spouting the standard Southern cliches. His subject matter is "Real Southy" enough to warm any New York magazine editor's heart, to be sure, but Hemphill consistently succeeds at writing with a deep and genuine feeling for it all.

He grew up in Birmingham, the son of a truck driver, tried to play professional baseball and went to football-crazy Auburn University before finally turning to writing, and he begins The Good Old Boys with personal pieces about his father and baseball. In later, increasingly factual pieces, it becomes clear that the way he looks at the South comes out of the experience of growing up there, and that his sentiments and observations are home-grown. His favorite kind of piece seems to involve some sort of journey back into his own past through looking at the remnants of the South of his youth, and he is at his best when writing about anachronisms, people who have been left behind in the shuffle of progress. There is, for example, his father, a diehard independent trucker; Bob Suffridge, the former all-American halfback for Tennessee who is now an alcoholic in Knoxville; Jabe Thomas, one of the only major-circuit stock car racers who does not having backing from Detroit; and a series of once-promising baseball players who never made it. Failures and dying breeds are Hemphill's stock-in-trade, but it never seems as if he's writing the same piece over and over with different characters because his eye for detail and dialogue and nuance remain sharp.

Hemphill owes a great deal to writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese in the devices he uses to make his articles work. He usually starts and ends each with a carefully constructed scene or conversations instead of the kind of throwaway catch-phrase that prevails in feature journalism, and he tries to catch the minutiae and inflections of speech that best reveal his subjects. At times, his debt to Wolfe becomes embarrassingly apparent in its magnitude, especially in his stock-car pieces, which always echo Wolfe's classic "The Last American Hero." The Wolfe style does have its limits, because it requires being able to spend long periods of time with subjects who are going about their normal lives; this precludes writing about most politicians, for instance, but Hemphill's particular interests make Wolfe's techniques perfect for him.

Hemphill was a Nieman Fellow a few years back, and Harvard was not a particularly pleasant experience for him. "It dawned on me, after too many boring cocktail parties with too many terribly proper New Englanders," he says, "that what I was really missing at Harvard was the sweaty passion for life I had always taken for granted while growing up in the South." Being able to capture the sweaty passion is what sustains Hemphill as a writer, and as long as that passion holds out he will be able to rise above the mass of cliches that are all that most non-Southerners ever get to read.